Elections in Spain: Socialists oppose the right wing

Given months of massive victories in all elections, the Spanish right is narrowly ahead of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists on Sunday evening, who against all odds retain a chance to stay in power thanks to a coalition game, according to partial results.

So the PP won 43 more seats in 2019 than in the previous elections, but far short of the 150 seats Mr. Feiju was aiming for. Worst of all, the PP and Vox would get only 165 seats in total, a far cry from the absolute majority needed to govern, which is 176.

Mr. Sanchez’s Socialist Party was credited with 126 delegates and his hardline left-wing ally Sumar with 30.

But Mr. Sanchez, in power for five years, is better positioned than his rival and may hope to stay in power, as he has a chance to garner the support of Basque and Catalan parties, for whom Vox is a rookie.

If no viable majority emerges, new elections can be held, in a country that has held four general elections between 2015 and 2019.

Polls taken over the past few days, the results of which were published at the close of the Vogt offices at 6:00 pm GMT, all predicted a landslide victory for the PP and even predicted an outright majority with Vogt’s support.

After the vote, Mr Fizzou, a former regional heavyweight of the PP, who had hoped his “time” had “come” to lead the country, said he hoped Spain would “enter a new era”.

A year before the referendum on the head of the PP, the 61-year-old moderate politician campaigned on the “repeal of Sanchezism”, a neologism referring to Mr Sanchez, whom the right-wing has accused of crossing red lines, notably by pardoning Catalan separatists condemned for the 2017 secession attempt or negotiating support for the Basque party Bildu, the successor to ETA’s political showcase in parliament. Adopt his reforms.

– Poker Shot –

Accustomed to poker moves, Mr. Sanchez made a new attempt by calling this early vote the day after the left’s defeat in local elections in late May to regain the initiative.

Campaigning on his track record, which is solid on economic matters, he invoked fear of the right wing above all in an effort to rally voters fearful of Vox entering government.

A government coalition between the PP and Vox would mark the return of the far-right to power in Spain for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, nearly half a century ago.

Mr. Sánchez would have benefited from a strong mobilization of the left, with turnout reaching almost 70% in November 2019, a 3.5-point increase over the previous turnout.

Notably nearly 2.5 million Spaniards voted by post, a record figure due to the fact that this election was the first to be held in mid-summer.

Vox already governs with the PP in three of the country’s 17 regions, where this formation, born of a split in the PP in late 2013, has shown it has no intention of giving up its priorities.

The election has generated unusual interest abroad due to the possibility of a PP/VOX coalition coming to power in a country considered a leader in rights for women or the LGBT+ community.

Very close to the positions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Vox denies the existence of gender violence, criticizes “climate fundamentalism” and is very openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion.

In a column published Sunday in the French daily Le Monde, former British Labor prime minister Gordon Brown predicted that Vox’s entry into government would “have ripple effects across the continent”.